Biological assays are of considerable and growing importance for scientific research and for medical practice. In many cases, biological assays can take an undesirably long time to perform. For example, medical tests for bacterial infections often take several days because a bacterial culture is made. Culturing can be avoided by more sensitive assay techniques, such as sequence identification via the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). However, a PCR assay is also time consuming and costly.
Accordingly, it would be an advance in the art to provide biological assays having improved performance and speed. In particular, it would be an advance in the art to detect markers for infection and/or disease at clinically relevant concentration levels in real time (i.e., <1 hour).